Pope Francis chose to define his papacy by love for the poor. He did so with concrete actions more than with words. He dedicated a former convent next to Saint Peter’s Square as a homeless shelter. He built showers and a laundry. A Vatican post office was converted into a free health clinic. He handed out sleeping bags on his birthday. He invited the homeless to large meals, which sometimes served up to twelve hundred people at once.
Francis knew that acts like these were icons of the love of Christ. He followed his namesake, who kissed a leper, and Martin of Tours, who tore his cloak in half for a beggar on a chilly night. The love of the poor spreads from heart to heart, as the Gospel itself does. After all, the love of the poor is the heart of the Gospel, in the Beatitudes, in the ministry of Jesus, and in the Last Judgement of the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew. One can be a good Christian by being a prudent administrator or even a savvy operator, leaven in the dough. Yet Christian witness is the light of the world. There is no substitute.
It may have seemed strange or incongruous, to the extent that it was noticed, that in the last summer of his life, Francis wrote a letter recommending that literature be incorporated into training for priestly and lay ministry. The letter is remarkable in several respects. Francis is no pious reader of literature. Borges and Proust loom larger than Lewis and Eliot. He does not give a fastidious list of works considered safe and edifying. He does not appeal to the boilerplate of Christian intellectuals in the United States, “the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.” He knows that, for instance, Macbeth is none of the three.
What does Francis love about literature? To read literature, all good literature, is to journey into the depths of the human experience. Literature displays, as Francis quotes, the “abysses of the human heart.” Christ took on our humanity, and with it all of its darkness; to seek out its depths is to share in Christ’s love for us. For this reason, one can read literature out of love for the poor, and love for Christ, and so nurture our understanding of non-fictional human beings.
Francis sees literature as a way to inhabit the lives of others, to navigate the shadowland between damnation and salvation where the outcome is invisible. Such a shadowland is familiar to all who seek to love deeply, and to all who know themselves. Saint Thérèse writes of the joy of discovering sin, so as to throw it onto the blazing furnace of God’s mercy. For this reason, the spiritual writer Catherine Doherty sought to “go without fear into the depths of men’s hearts.”
Francis’s letter evokes, without mentioning it, the spiritual realm of the Psalms. The Fathers of the Church read the Psalms as spoken through the mouth of Christ. Through David’s words, Christ travels to the depths, from which He cries out to His Father. We know this from His “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
Prior to her conversion, Dorothy Day found herself jailed after a suffragette protest. She found herself praying, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord,” overwhelmed by compassion for the suffering women of all walks of life who surrounded her. She describes her own training for life with the poor in reading novels and seeking out the real world they portrayed.
When Christ speaks, with the Psalmist, of the wish to smash the heads of His enemies’ children against a rock, He inhabits the pain of the father who has watched the murder of his children. Modern readers recoil; these verses are left out of the breviary and the lectionary. They should not be. Our refusal to identify with the speaker suggests that we think ourselves above any such low inclination. We imagine we have moved beyond vengeful instincts or that we can resist them well before resorting to violence against children. This imagining is the fruit of pride. We should be prepared, like Christ, to travel through every human experience, no matter how dark. By doing so, we test our faith in the Incarnation, that God has redeemed through love the whole of the human being.
We imagine that our aversion to violence or darkness in literature is an aversion to sin. But as Francis sees it, our aversion is really a kind of numbness, a failure to feel. Francis, citing T. S. Eliot, diagnoses the “emotional incapacity” of our age. We engulf ourselves in social media–
fueled anger so that we will not feel the pain of our neighbor, or our own pain. We reduce our emotions to reactions: smiley face, sad face, angry face, caring face.
Consider by contrast the emotional range demanded by a Shakespeare play. We weep with Lear and laugh with his Fool. Underneath the comic absurdity of the midsummer night’s dream is real fear and heartbreak, the reversal of fortune, the sudden death of true love. Outside of literature, we cannot simplify the rending pain of grief and gratitude at the deathbed of a loved one, the tears at a wedding, the joy of a birth that tears life down to its bare roots. So should our pain at sin and the sinner be the pain of Christ’s, with hope for mercy, with joy at promised redemption.
James Baldwin wrote of Shakespeare, “The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love—by knowing, which is not the same as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.”
Since I was a philosophy professor before I became a Roman Catholic, it is often assumed that I came into the Church by force of argument. But my conversion was fueled by the failures of the intellect: the inevitable discord of highly trained and able minds, the impossible rift between aspiration and act, the intractable mystery of the operations of grace. I came into the Church seeking a united human family, a heart that enters the hearts of others without fear, that searches out the depths of life to take further and further leaps of faith.
Pope Francis understood these aspirations well. In the life to come, the mind is fulfilled in the sight of God. But until then, its power is weak. It is the heart that seeks what it does not understand, the heart that lays down its life for what it does not know, and the heart that brokers peace, the greatest fruit of charity.
This essay is part of a symposium on Pope Francis’s life and legacy. Read the rest here.
